Best paper award for Wasted Energy?

Absolutely delighted to find that our Pervasive Computing paper: Christian Remy, Adam Tyler, Paul Smith, Oliver Bates, Adrian Friday, “Wasted Energy? Illuminating Energy Data With Ontologies,” in IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 27-37, April-June 2024, just won a ‘best paper’ award.  The paper deals with all the non-energy data (context) you need to make sense of and explore time-series energy data, and proposes an approach for organisations to improve the gathering of this, in part using ontologies.

Enjoyed my invited talk at MobiUK on ‘rethinking resource efficiency’ for sustainabilty

Enjoyed the chance to talk to the interesting folks at MobiUK on mobile computing and sustainability. I attempted to reconsider the role of ‘resource efficiency’ not as a driver of growth of ICT’s impacts on the planet, but rather to work within planetary limits. Digital technology unquestionably transforms our understanding of the world and helps society reconfigure itself to do new things from better healthcare, climate science, self-driving cars and smart cities, and more. Yet, I argued, ICT has significant direct impacts on energy material systems, and an exponentially growing footprint. As researchers, innovators and practitioners, what should the MobiUK community be doing to help bring about a more environmentally sustainable future? The slides are available.

Talk with ecologists without borders in Slovenia, well, online :)

Enjoyed doing talk to inspiring group (Ekologi brez meja – ecologists without borders) in Slovenia on Building digital solutions for the Anthropocene: avoiding digital wastefulness (talk on YouTube).  Key points: how the infrastructure we build into the tools we use everyday, e.g. building AI into search, is leading to growth in energy demand, data centres and materials.  Plus the need to look systematically at energy systems, IT, water and material resources and how they do and will impact the environment and society in the future.

No planet B, interactions blog post on sustainability, HCI and academic practice

Writeup reflecting on the themes from our panel at CHI 2023 on sustainability in HCI (at last!). The panel were myself, Ann Light, Jason Tarl Jacques, Matthew Louis Mauriello, Kathrin Gerling, Robert Soden, Gözel Shakeri, and we were enabled by the SIGCHI sustainability committee and chair Nicola J. Bidwell, Vishal Sharma, and Neha Kumar.  We talk about the need to exercise all our agency (in our research and our academic practice), to recognise the embedding of drivers of unsustainability, and the need to embed and encourage sustainability focused work.

re:publica 2023 Berlin

As part of the net0insights project, Christian presented Lancaster University’s efforts to contribute to a more sustainable future at the re:publica conference in Berlin. re:publica is a “festival for the digital society” where representatives of politics, industry, research, and media meet to discuss how digitalisation can shape our world, and do so in a sustainable way. The conference offers plenty of opportunity for networking as it is less focused on stages with speakers, but has a lot of booths were organisations present their work and are available to chat. The diversity of exhibitions, ranging from Germany’s biggest media stations, several municipalities, research labs, and small organisations, but also most governmental departments, offered plenty of thought-provoking conversations and new contacts. While most attendees roam those smaller booths and exhibitions, the big presentation areas are particularly crowded when government representatives take the stage, such as the Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. Overall the event was an interesting alternative to traditional academic conferences and highly recommended!

ARINZRIT digital research infrastructure sustainability report published!

UK research increasingly relies on ‘digital research infrastructure’ (DRI): digital technologies and computational facilities from laptops to high-performance computing and large-scale data archives. DRI has an energy and carbon impact as a result of performing computational work (emissions scope 1), the energy needed to drive them and how this is generated (scope 2), and their manufacture and disposal (scope 3).  In our report, we outline our key findings and offer recommendations for more sustainable DRI policy and practice.  Our recommendations also demonstrate that interventions should not just be technical, but also to training, procurement and research culture!  Read more: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7966424.